June 2008
For all coaches and parents.

Look, I have been saying this since I arrived in Arizona! Sometimes I can be at fault for using articles from England, but at the moment the EPL is simply the best league in the world, lets start with that as our premise.

However, at the grass roots level England has had it all wrong for years and look what has happened to their national teams.
On the last day of the season it was reported that out of the 210 players who were in the starting line ups, 20 teams x 11 players only 42 players qualified to be selected for the national team. If you compare this figure with other high profile leagues, countires such as Italy approximately 65-70% of the players are Italian!

Youth football in my opininon is heavily influenced by professional trends! Here in the USA I believe we are certainly on the right track. We are developing players, the MLS and the USL are getting better and we have USA college graduates filling up the professional rosters!

At the grass roots level it is all about player rentention, keeping players in the game. As I have said on many occassions in my articles, ODP sessions, during the State license programs, we place too much emphasis on "winning and tactics" while the players are still trying to perfect and experiment with techniques.

As a state we are simply not doing our players any favours by allowing our 9 and 10 year olds to play 8 vs 8 and our 12 year old age groups to play 11 vs 11. Parents must understand that to a 10 year old player 11 vs 11 is not the real game. It is the real game to most parents because it is what they see being played by professionals on the televison.

I know you all know who Manchester United are! Maybe we all might be able to better understand the small sided game concept if clubs like Manchester United are adopting small sided games for their young players. There is a reason!

There is hope; Exclusive English football in crisis.

"Don't let under 12s play in 11-a-sides on full size pitches, stick to four against four so they get plenty of the ball. Ban parents ..then our kids will match best in the world", says Man Utd coaching guru.

Byline: by Ken Lawrence

Brian Barwick's root-and-branch brigade might want to plant themselves at the Carrington HQ of Manchester United and watch how schoolboys are being taught how to play the Beautiful Game.

As the nation asks itself how it can be that game's mother country is failing to nurture a winning breed of players, the FA team appointed by chief executive Barwick would discover that Sir Alex Ferguson's coaches are five years into a plan that they believe can turn some of their 12-year-olds into continental-style stars.

United's youngest players have been going back to the roots of football by playing four v four games designed to recreate the thrills, spills and skills of the kind of street games that spawned World Cup winners.

Not that the concept is a new one, in fact it has been under the FA's noses for over 30 years.

Rinus Michels was the man who invented Total Football and with it he took Holland to the 1974 World Cup Final and European Championship success in 1988.

But he started that philosophy by insisting that all children under the age of 12 play in games of four against four, his belief being that the mini version of football would produce a harvest of stars.

Now United are doing it too. Rick Finoglio, head of Manchester Metropolitan University's Sports Science Department, was in at the start of what Ferguson's coaches at first saw as an experiment in using some of Michels' ideas for kids.

Finoglio, also cofounder of the "Give Us Back Our Game" campaign, an organisation dedicated to putting the fun back into football and encouraging excellence among youngsters, is stunned by the development of United's kids.

And he has this heart-warming message for the millions who believe England can never match the continentals for skill and sophistication: "Our young players can be as good as any that come out of France, Italy, Africa - or Croatia for that matter.

"The trick is in how they are taught. And the way they are being taught right now in most of the country has taken schoolboy and youth football to catastrophe point.

"There are too many coaches who don't know what they are doing, too many parents screaming on the sidelines, the games on full-size pitches which means some kids often don't get a kick.

"United saw this and wanted to change. They asked me to advise them in terms of sports science - in how they learn the game in a neuromuscular way - and the results have been fantastic.

"Not only are games only four a side. Parents aren't allowed anywhere near them and the kids even referee the games themselves - you would be amazed at how disciplined and organised they become.

"Above all, these kids get time on the ball. In every game. And after five years these kids are about as good an under-12 team as United will ever have had.

"We work alongside United in promoting what is basically like the old street football you saw on every corner - the kind of games that allowed freedom of expression and gave kids the time to learn skills and tricks that they never forget.

"In this country there are 43,000 football clubs of various sizes and they almost all get it wrong. A 10-year-old shouldn't have to worry about winning or losing - he should just be working at expressing himself.

"The future could be so bright. And it is there right in front of the FA's eyes.

We must all look to the future and consider strongly the impact that our mind set is having on our players in Arizona.

Tony Colavecchia
AYSA Director of Coaching